Scientists Believe There is Life on Neptune! How Does It Look?

there's one weird thing and NASA's Mission schedule the two newest probes will go to explore Venus in 2029 and 2031 and at the same time the unique and very promising Trident mission to the most unexplored World in the solar system is listed as canceled in 2038 it was supposed to shed light on the gloomy Cosmic realm of Neptune but now we'll have to wait for a similar flight right up to 2049 that's if NASA doesn't change its mind again but why do scientists keep postponing the flight to Neptune it's definitely not a matter of significant

distance because NASA's New Horizons spacecraft even visited the more distant Pluto back in 2015 is NASA afraid to discover something so incredible 100 around Neptune that it'll change our understanding of the entire solar system maybe even terrestrial life Neptune is full of mysteries that would make no sense if they weren't absolutely real foreign [Music] covered with such a veil of Secrets it can't be found on any old map of the Starry Sky Babylonian astronomers in ancient times were considered the best but even they knew only six of the current ape planets the first ice giant

Uranus could still somehow be seen through an ordinary telescope and only William Herschel succeeded in this at the end of the 18th century but Neptune is one and a half times further than Uranus it revolves around the Sun at a distance of four and a half billion kilometers its orbit is 30 times wider than that of Earth so ice giant makes one rotation in only 165 years it turns out that it's so far away and moves so slowly across the sky that even Galileo Galilei who was incredibly lucky to see Neptune twice against the background

of Jupiter's moons in 1612 mistook it for a dim star the legendary astronomer couldn't even imagine that there could be another planet at such a distance from Earth but in the end Neptune was discovered just thanks to the power of imagination by 1846 Uranus had just completed its first rotation around the Sun since its Discovery in French astronomer Urbane levariate noticed something inexplicable in its movement it was as if some massive Celestial body kept slowing down Uranus with its gravity leveria sat down for the calculations and a few months later it to the possible location

of the new planet in the night sky however most colleagues didn't take him seriously it didn't fit in their heads that it was possible to discover a massive planet with just the help of calculations fortunately researchers from Berlin University had a different opinion and on the night of September 24th 1846 they discovered a new planet just at that spot where the French astronomer had pointed at first they wanted to name it after him but then today's maps of the solar system would look pretty awkward as a result scientists decided to settle on Neptune in honor

of the Roman God of waters and seas now this seems logical given the planet's deep blue color but it was actually a coincidence indeed for a century and a half no one had been able to see Neptune's surface from Earth when NASA's Voyager tube probe approached the ice Giant in August of 1989 scientists didn't expect to see anything special at such a huge distance from the Sun where it turns into a dim star they expected to find an inert Frozen ball but instead they saw a surprisingly active world with hurricanes dispersing giant clouds in a

big dark spot of Unknown Origin after the monotonous and calm Uranus Neptune looked like something incredible and even more so no one thought Voyager 2 would discover five new satellites of the ice giant at once and film The hypothesized Ice rings but since this NASA spacecraft flew further into the depths of space no other Earth's ship has visited that region however in 2022 Neptune threw a surprise thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope astronomers unexpectedly saw dust Lanes in addition to ice rinks which made Neptune look like Saturn everything points to the fact that we

know catastrophically little about this distant and Mysterious World on the outskirts of the solar system but can scientists be hesitant to send a new Mission because they want to remind the public that they have no idea where Neptune even came from why didn't Neptune form just where we found it from the planetary scientist point of view it's either too big or too small to occupy its current orbit depending on how exactly it appeared gravitational calculations have shown that Neptune has a mass of 17 and something times more than that of Earth approximately one-fifth of it

is concentrated in the silicate nickel iron core in fact a rocky planet is hidden inside Neptune that planet is a little larger than our Earth with huge layers of various gases mainly hydrogen and helium on top of it most likely Jupiter has a similar structure but at the same time it weighs like 318ers which is 18 times heavier than Neptune at first planetary scientists didn't see anything unusual about all of this Jupiter formed in the middle part of the protoplanetary disk which was richest in light gases and the farther from the Sun the less material

it needed accordingly Saturn weighs as much as 95 Earths in Uranus 14 and a half but wait if that's the case why is Neptune which is two and a half times farther away suddenly turned out to be significantly heavier than the previous Planet if it formed in the Solar System's outskirts it should be at least twice as light as Uranus therefore more and more scientists are inclined to the version that Neptune must have appeared much closer to the Sun perhaps in the vicinity of the current orbit of Saturn however then some gravitational cataclysm threw it

into the backyard simulations show that young Jupiter could have done a similar trick it got so close to Saturn that their orbits resonated and pulled apart dramatically pushing Uranus and Neptune far away in the process there's only one problem in such a dangerous dance the most distant planet probably had to fly out of the solar system and become a rogue Planet this means Neptune was either incredibly lucky or it wasn't the farthest one at all I guess you didn't expect to hear about hypothetical Planet X in a video about Neptune however one Theory claims that

during this orbital dance the ice giant brutally pushed its partner away from the solar system and only due to this it managed to retain its position but this story about the origin of Neptune requires so many coincidences at once that scientists are considering Alternatives and much more intriguing versions the classic Model from the formation of giant planets resembles a slow wrapping of cotton candy on a stick this is the accretion of gas around a solid core which can continue for millions of years however for Jupiter to gain such an impressive mass in this way it

would take much more time than there was free gas in the young solar system scientists are trying to explain this discrepancy using the disc instability model in it the protoplanetary disc cools very quickly and produces huge clots which become gas giant planets within a few thousand years it's like not waiting for cotton candy to be wrapped around a stick but instead pulling a big lump of melted sugar right out of the tank this method perfectly explains not only the size of Jupiter but also the orbit of Neptune but it still leads to a contradiction if

the ice giant really formed due to this instability of the protoplanetary disc it would be much more massive than it is now possibly even reaching the level of Saturn or more in the desperate attempt to save this Theory American astronomer Alan boss proposed an even more surprising one according to his theory Neptune was forcibly stripped of its mass a massive blue star like Sirius flew by the solar system and simply blew off half or more of the gas from both Neptune and Uranus who knows maybe it stole Planet X along with it and although it's

already proven that small Stars fly by in the vicinity of the solar system about every 50 000 years a more massive alien star would hardly affect the ice giants exclusively a large star would obviously sweep the Kuiper belt which begins just beyond the orbit of Neptune and contains many dwarf planets but what if in this whole story the alien star was Neptune itself in 2012 scientists at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for astrophysics calculated that the billions of stars in our galaxy could at some point capture at least one Rogue planet from Interstellar space and make

it part of their system this is how some astronomers prefer to explain Giant exoplanets in such orbits that are too far away such a formation is just impossible according to known methods thus Neptune could have been formed in an alien star system and then traveled for millions of years in the darkness of space until it was finally captured by the gravity of the sun this means this ice giant could be from a truly alien world where our usual ideas about planets don't apply if Neptune is actually an exoplanet that accidentally flew into the solar system

that would explain its extremely anomalous structure remember the mysterious Great Dark Spot photographed by Voyager 2 in 1989 it was larger than Earth and scientists were eager to study it in more detail however when NASA sent its new Hubble Space Telescope to Neptune five years later there was no trace of the strange formation in the atmosphere but in 2018 that same Hubble spotted a new giant spot not far from the North Pole of Neptune and two years later a smaller formation appeared nearby which scientists nicknamed the dark spot Junior it looks like an unknown form

of alien life is living and breeding on Neptune like giant colonies of microbes they could cover many square kilometers of the seabed on Earth so don't they just have some word of roam on the much larger Neptune scientists don't seriously consider such a theory according to their version dark spots on the surface of Neptune are nothing more than Mega storms like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter but if there are ammonia compounds that covered on Jupiter a Neptune it's basically Frozen methane Crystals at a temperature of -200 degrees Celsius they're excellent at absorbing red rays

and are thought to be responsible for the overall blue color of the planet the giant anticyclone appears darker as it lifts many more crystals from deep within the atmosphere logically this storm on icy Neptune should be much slower than on the larger hotter Jupiter but either way there's little Logic on Neptune in fact along with the edges of neptunian storms winds Rush at speeds of up to 2 100 kilometers per hour which is one and a half times faster than the speed of sound and about three times faster than the currents in the most severe

storms on Jupiter but why is such activity even possible on the ice giant its traces are everywhere Neptune radiates two and a half times more heat into space than it receives from the Sun and as if things weren't already quite bizarre scientists recently discovered that right in the middle of its 40-year warm season Neptune doesn't heat up like any other planet but cools down all of this suggests that under the dense cover-up neptunian clouds there's a certain planetary heat engine with its own extremely exotic operation mode but what's it like if NASA does send a

mission to Neptune it'll be equipped with a decent probe to study the atmosphere hiding under the clouds it'll begin a long journey through its impressive thickness from the poor amount of data that Voyager 2 was able to send scientists concluded that the upper layer consists of hydrogen and helium with a bit of methane and hydrogen sulfide and extends to a depth of 10 to 20 percent of Neptune's radius Crossing such an atmospheres like traveling to the very center of Earth only not in solid rock but in ever condensing gases for the most part pitch Darkness

Reigns here occasionally interrupted by gigantic lightning of relentlessly raging thunderstorms this is just another consequence of Neptune's anomalous heat whose Source lies much deeper in the mantle it's unlikely that on the way to it any terrestrial probe Will Survive the incredible pressure of the lower layers of the atmosphere a hundred thousand times stronger than those of Earth the temperature rises accordingly so that the mantle judging by the heat given off by Neptune is heated up to no less than 5 000 degrees Celsius the same temperature rains on the surface of the Sun however the sun

is a star not a gas giant covered with ice you probably already imagined the neptunian mantle is a thick layer of molten lava like on Earth it's not like that at all in fact this is a water ammonia ocean with methane impurities one and a half of our planet's thickness hold on a second how can the liquid water inside Neptune be several thousand degrees cold the answer lies in the extremely high pressure that doesn't allow it to evaporate instead it turns the mantle into an ocean of ionized supercritical fluid that has a number of poorly

studied properties one of them is increased electrical conductivity which could explain Neptune's extremely strange magnetic field it resembles a giant spider and extends into space at least 35 radii of the planet itself at the same time it isn't oriented along its geographical poles but the supercritical ocean of Neptune might be the hiding spot not only for the source of this magnetic phenomenon but also for the heat engine to be more precise this is a diamond gravity generator in 2017 German researchers from The helmholtz Institute in Dresden using a powerful laser system recreated the pressure of

one and a half in atmospheres which is characteristic of the neptunian's supercritical mantle under such conditions organic compounds like methane break down carbon as the heaviest element tends to settle down under the influence of gravity but due to the incredible pressure it condenses into diamonds right on the go on Neptune they can be up to one meter across in their friction against the surrounding supercritical fluid creates a lot of excess Heat this makes the ice giant the most expensive planet in the solar system if we remove the atmosphere and mantle we could see a stone

core fully covered with a layer of super giant diamonds if sounds like a dream doesn't it yet it's precisely what the most consistent scientific theories about the Neptune structure look like but scientists are puzzled not only by what lies deep inside of it objects around Neptune look like something out of Science Fiction the Kuiper belt which is adjacent to the orbit of the ice giant is just like the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter only 10 times wider and much less studied Pluto is the most massive and well-known Celestial body in this Twilight Zone but

far from the only dwarf planet back in 2002 a chaor object was discovered in the Kuiper belt a little over a thousand one hundred kilometers in diameter it resembles an enormous asteroid and quite possibly doesn't even have a spherical shape astronomers got a surprise when Hubble captured way what a small satellite near kaor binary systems of celestial bodies are very rare but even this isn't the strangest thing while watching chaos slowly flying against the stars from 2018 to 2020 astronomers spotted a distant ring of debris within weiwat's orbit it all looks very picturesque but according

to all calculations it shouldn't exist in the first place there was no way KR would have been able to tear apart another smaller Celestial body at a distance four times its own diameter but even if by some miracle it collected a ring of small debris from the Kuiper belt they would have long ago merged together into the second satellite of kaor now scientists don't have any explanation for this phenomena but they believe the strange ring is somehow related to weiwot though I have a better idea what if scientists accidentally witnessed an artificial structure like a

swarm of solar panels around a long abandoned spaceship anyway if you seriously set out to find aliens on the outskirts of the solar system you should look for them much closer to Neptune during a flyby of the ice Giant in 1989 Voyager 2 also aimed its lenses at its largest satellite Trident which is only slightly smaller than Earth's moon and although the device managed to capture less than half of its surface even this was enough to puzzle scientists again despite the temperature of Triton being only 40 degrees above absolute zero which makes it perhaps the

coldest Celestial body in the solar system the diverse Topography of the satellite indicates Relentless geological activity apparently it's provided by cryovolcanism that is eruptions of water ammonia methane mixed with dust scientists managed to notice the multi-kilometer trails of Triton cryovolcanoes which somewhat resembled terrestrial geysers though here due to the extremely low gravity their ejecta reaches space itself all of this makes Astro geologists talk about the existence of an Under Ice ocean on Triton from which liquid escapes to the surface it could well have been kept from freezing by the decay of radioactive elements in Triton's

core so along with Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus Triton could be a great candidate for a quest for extraterrestrial underwater life quite possibly even the most promising one after all unlike similar satellites Triton has an anomalous retrograde orbit it rotates in the direction opposite Neptune's rotation direction this means it did not form with the ice giant but was accidentally captured by its gravity Triton is a real alien from the Kuiper belt and even from outside the solar system what if is a dwarf planet that initially belonged to another star but when it flew

near Neptune Triton simply jumped into its orbit due to gravitational perturbations at the same time an analysis of the ice giants others smaller satellites and its rings showed that the alien during its jump most likely crushed Neptune's more ancient natural satellite to make room for itself and here's another anomaly of Triton its powerful ionosphere which is much stronger than that of other similar celestial bodies and we get just a fantastic picture perhaps there's not just a dwarf wandering Planet living in the orbit of Neptune real Arc of the civilization of underwater creatures whose installations hidden

under the surface create an anomalous cyanosphere maybe there are propulsion systems located on the unexplored half of Triton this hypothesis doesn't seem to be that incredible given that Houston Community College scientist Irina romanovskaya described a very similar way of interstellar travel in her scientific paper in her opinion Advanced extraterrestrial civilizations could use such wandering planets as colonization ships and with their help Drift from star to star for millions of years that's why I thought if NASA's detected a strange signal from Triton confirming this version the sudden cancellation of the neptunian mission would no longer look

so out of place it might be a simple precautionary measure either way mysterious Neptune deserves a closer study most importantly because planets with similar features make up a third of all exoplanets we've discovered and it may well turn out that James Webb will detect the first biomarkers in its atmosphere and those indirect signs of alien life will be very different from ours just imagine giant stingray-like creatures that float in icy clouds and feed on colonies of microbes in the same way that terrestrial whales feed on oceanic Plankton considering that no one really understands what Neptune

is such creatures might just live there what do you think is the main reason for the constant delays of NASA missions to the ice Giant thank you [Music]